The 22 greatest TV adaptations

Brideshead Revisited is television’s greatest literary adaptation, bar none.
It's utterly faithful to Evelyn Waugh's novel yet it's somehow more than
that, too. Adapatations are almost invariably less. Over 13 hours, it
wallows in every last detail of Waugh’s longest work – indeed, large chunks
of its run were spent with Jeremy Irons, as Waugh’s alter ego Charles Ryder,
reading out passages from the book verbatim in narration. It makes achingly
real a vanished world, and gives us a Sebastian Flyte (in Anthony Andrews)
so disarming that it is impossible not to love him. Filming lasted nine
months and took place all over Europe; it cost what in today’s money would
virtually buy you a whole channel, let alone a one-off series. It represents
a particularly British type of TV literary drama that they just don’t make
any more (at least we thought they didn't, until Wolf Hall).